[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] Test the new software! test.wikipedia.com is up!

[Larry Sanger]

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Larry Sanger wrote:

> So I'd like to ask the list: *are* there any outstanding issues that are
> so important that we just *have* to have them fixed before we move to the
> new software?  This could be very important, so I hope those of you who
> care about this will give it some thought.

To answer my own question, right now, there's only one really bad problem.
There are problems to fix, but nothing that should stop us from moving
forward.

The really bad problem is that there is no easy way to go back to reedit
redirected pages.  For example, suppose that for any reason I want to edit
"philisophy" (which redirects to "philosophy").  When I go to

http://test.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Philisophy

the URL doesn't change, but I see the "philosophy" article.  If I press
the "edit this page" link, I arrive at

http://test.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?action=edit&title=Philosophy

So, if I want to edit the "philisophy" redirection page, I have to change
the latter URL to

http://test.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?action=edit&title=Philosophy

and only then can I do it!

This might or might not be related to the problem that

http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Larry_Sanger/Columns

isn't redirecting.

My own personal top priorities, though, are as follow (drawn from
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Bugs ):

(1) I'd like to turn off the section numbering.  Does anyone like it?  I
don't.  I'd rather not have my sections numbered--I'd like to have the
choice, anyway.  Sometimes, I have just one heading at the top of a pages;
that shouldn't be numbered "#1".  This sort of thing is better done by
humans, not made automatic, IMO.

(2) This one: "The script parses an ending period as part of an external
link. e.g. http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Recent_Changes. It should
probably ignore final periods. --Stephen Gilbert"

(3) This one: "There's no "Talk" functionality for user pages."  There
should be talk functionality for all namespaces.  I also agree with this:
'I think what would work is for each namespace (such as "user:" or
"Wikipedia:") there will automatically be a related talk namespace (such
as "user talk:" or "Wikipedia talk:"). That would resolve the issue,
though perhaps the need for this points out a flaw in the current design."

(4) This one (if it hasn't been fixed yet): "The script just missed an
edit conflict, and claimed "Your page Wikipedia:Bugs was successfully
saved!" when in fact it saved the "Added
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\" revision."

(5) This one :-( : "I cannot simply hit the back button in my browser,
after I have saved a page, and make another change to the page.  I do that
all the time in UseModWiki, but I can't do it on PediaWiki because I get
into an edit conflict with myself."

(6) This: "Other namespaces : Talk" is just confusing to about 99% of
users.  This should be changed to something like "Discuss changes to this
article: Talk".

(7) Finish the list of the new features.
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml?title=wikipedia:New+features

(8) The parser doesn't work as expected here:
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml?title=Mathematics

I think that's it!

Others might have other priorities, but I think the above would really
cause significant frustration for a significant number of people.  But
just frustration, that's all.

Larry